Monthly Archives: May 2018

I had to have a private funeral for a friend today. That friend is my Misti stamping platform. It was one of the very first Misti’s available and it has been a faithful friend for years, but today it died. A whole chunk of the lid broke off in my hand and it is no more. Goodbye friend and hello to my new friend. Anybody want to guess how long it will take before my new friend looks as well used as my old friend?

Today’s card set a new record for do-over’s. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong with this one. First of all, if I followed the instructions on the packaging, the giraffe’s were not merely hugging, but rather were strangling each other. It took several attempts before I realized that indeed, the measurements were off. Then, there were several more attempts to stamp the Giraffes in just the right position on the card. There is an “L” shape guide on the bottom of the stamp but with long necks and a floppy stamp, it can end up being out enough that the dies don”t fit on squarely. Chalk up three more attempts when I put the gatefold card in the Misti upside down and stamped the long side stamp on the short side and vice versa. Wouldn’t you know that I coloured and it intertwined perfectly……………….before I noticed that the whole thing was off centre. More attempts were discarded due to ink smudges from my fingers, as I had just re-inked my black ink and it was a bit too juicy. The “piece de resistance” was when I finally got nearly the whole card finished and one of my copic markers “blooped” all over the image. This almost never happens with my copics…………….are you kidding me? This card is actually one of the ones where it ended up off centre, but I liked it that way, as I could add the long grass embossing on the wider side of the card.

I have been playing with some super fun products from Gina K. One of the sets starts with a butterfly stamp. Now, I am thinking that a butterfly image is probably one of the first stamps I ever bought. There has been a few more purchased over the years. After all, you can’t use a frilly lace butterfly on a Tim Holtz masculine tag can you. No of course not. There has also been a couple of “buyer’s remorse” bug/butterfly images that I have bought over the years. One such stamp set includes some really botanical looking moths and dragonflies. Are you kidding me? I hate those things. I hate the time of year where the moths take up residence in my newspaper that has been placed in my mailbox. I mean really, they must be hovering about, just waiting for the paper person to put the paper in my mailbox at 6:00 am, and then they dive in for a snooze. It takes me a while to get over a buyer’s remorse item, so it takes a special stamp set to get me to buy that type of image once more. The Gina K butterflies stamp set is just such a stamp set.

This is a card that looks difficult but isn’t. It is easy to line up the images for stamping and super easy to add the foiled backgrounds. You just need an inexpensive laminator to adhere the foil to the cards. If you want instant elegance, with a “How did she do that?” look on a card, give Gina K foil products a try.

I will be entering this card into the Stamplorations THINGS WITH WINGS challenge:

It is kind of funny how images of certain animals suddenly become popular. They pop up on everything from clothes to home decor and , of course, cards. Recently it has been llamas that have been in the trendy spotlight.

I saw this llama die from Spellbinders, and it was too cute to pass up. I don’t usually like die sets without stamps, but this guy had all the details to look great on his own. Paired with the Paprika paper collection from Photoplay, it was perfect.

When checking out the correct colours for llamas, I found this interesting warning sign. Photo is by Lutty Moreina.